Woman, Man, Bourbon

During Sunday night’s season première of “Mad Men,” Woodford Reserve, a respected, mid-shelf bourbon, kicked off a new national ad campaign with a thirty-second spot entitled “Bookshelf.” It features a laid-back drumbeat, filtered-light visuals, and one of the better-looking crowds of day drinkers that you’re likely to see. This is a scene from a specific kind of appealing life: say, a weekend at somebody’s rustic but carefully decorated second home, which is both in the woods and near the ocean, spent among a group of eccentrically beautiful non-relatives between the ages of twenty-five and sixty.

However, the ad drew notice not for its hipster-fantasy aesthetics but for its copy, which an unseen woman delivers, in a beguiling voice over:

When I see a man drinking bourbon,I expect him to be the kind who could build me a bookshelf. But not in the way that one builds a ready-made bookshelf. He will already know where the lumberyard is. He’ll get the right amount of wood without having to do math. He’ll let me use the saw, and not find it cute that I don’t know how to use the saw.

Along with impugning IKEA and, oddly, mathematics, the ad makes a rather old-fashioned statement about gender. Tracy Moore, at Jezebel, called the ad sexist, pointing out its retrograde ideas regarding women, what with the whole aw-shucks circumlocution about knowing, or not knowing, how to use a saw. Parsing this bit of near-poetry about handymen and the women who love them, Moore wrote that the woman in this situation is left “watching, finding this sexy, adding nothing to the scenario but reverence for his skills.” Either that, or injuring herself by wielding a saw that she doesn’t know how to use.

Is the Woodford Reserve ad sexist? Not at all, Biba Konieczna, a brand director at Brown-Forman, Woodford Reserve’s parent company, said in an interview with Advertising Age. The woman’s voice in the ad was “defining, in a way, her expectations towards men,” Konieczna said. The spot, along with five others made by the agency Fallon, in Minneapolis, was written by a woman and photographed by a woman. The campaign was designed, she said, to “give women a voice as bourbon drinkers.”

The other ads in the series present further complications, however. One of the spots, also voiced by a woman, celebrates a desirable bourbon man as someone who will settle good-natured fights with his pals by arm wrestling. Two others are voiced by men. In one, a man explains that a woman who drinks bourbon is someone who “knows how to tell a story to a table full of people without giving up full possession of the details, because then it would be their story, not hers.” Mansplaining, maybe, but it is, at least, a celebration of women as storytellers, if preferably circumspect ones. The other is more troublesome: “When I see a woman drinking bourbon, I’m prepared to tolerate a lot of her business. In the end, I figure, she’s got that rare thing that makes her not just tolerate but enjoy my thorny mess.” As any savvy bro knows, sometimes a woman’s business needs to be tolerated, as long as she really loves your, um, “thorny mess,” whatever, exactly, that is. This, of course, is a crude, male-imagined feminine ideal—the chill, adoring girl—and worse, surely, than the business about the saw.

In the pantheon of sexist alcohol advertising, Woodford barely merits inclusion. It is, after all, already a crowded house—full of bikini models, harping wives avoided down at the bar, and other examples of boring misogyny. Just last year, the Scotch brand Dewar’s aired a campaign that featured a man jumping in front of a heavyset woman to protect his friend from her advances. There was a backlash; Dewar’s scrapped the ad. Whiskey continues to be marketed mostly to men—and, when they’re not emphasizing whiskey’s contributions to male sex appeal, companies have often portrayed it as representing a kind of safe haven of masculinity. “Unlike your girlfriend, they never ask where this relationship is going,” a Jim Beam ad said, about male drinking buddies. Whiskey is about enacting particular rites of manhood, alone with other men and the ghosts of the manlier men of the past. “Your Dad Was Not a Metrosexual,” said Canadian Club. (Knowing the game, however, doesn’t make you immune to it. This winter, I bought a bottle of Elmer T. Lee bourbon because the icy-cool badass Boyd Crowder always seemed to be drinking it on the television show “Justified”; he’s just the kind of guy who could build a bookshelf without resorting to math.)

Woodford Reserve’s ads are different in that they target not only the gender anxieties of men but also those of women. If that’s progress, it is an attenuated form of it. After all, alcohol has often been sold in various bullying ways. Ads for spirits, like those for other luxury goods, are usually aspirational, prodding drinkers to consider just how much better their good times could be were they to aim one shelf higher at the bar or in the liquor store. And they are often confrontational, intended to either produce or uncover some form of status anxiety. Often, the focus is on wealth, as in the famous Maker’s Mark print ad from the nineteen-sixties, which read, “It tastes expensive … and is!” (Translation: You may be too poor to have this. Or: Having this proves that you are rich.) At other times, the issue is a more general one of status or taste, as conveyed in the motto printed on bottles of Hendrick’s gin: “It is not for everyone.” (Translation: This may be too complicated for you. Or: Drinking this proves you are complicated.) Bud Light never demands to see your credentials, but a good whiskey, gin, or vodka might not be entirely comfortable with you as its brand ambassador (that is, consumer). The Woodford Reserve spot hits the dual notes of money and taste: Is your shirt distressed enough? Is your hair mussed enough? Are your stories good enough? But it also asks another question: Are you man or woman enough?

If Woodford Reserve had really wanted to “give women a voice” as bourbon drinkers, it might have taken a cue from Jim Beam, which is running a series of ads featuring the actress Mila Kunis. Beam could have paid her to do all kinds of dumb, familiar stuff. She might have stared into the camera and told the guys how impressed she would be if she saw them drinking bourbon at the bar. Or it might have made some big to-do about the fact that she's a beautiful woman who actually likes bourbon—as if she were some kind of rare bird. Instead, in one spot that is currently running on television, she’s wearing a pair of coveralls and branding barrels in the rack house.

Despite the modern, fashionable feel of its new ads, Woodford Reserve’s definitions of gender are radically narrow, and its sense of the possibilities for human sexuality even narrower. Men must appeal to women, and women to men. To attract women, men have to be rugged and capable while maintaining a perfect veneer of nonchalance. Women can spot a phony or a wimp a mile away. Women, meanwhile, have to be forever good sports, proud of their men’s rough edges and presentable in mixed company with the rowdy boys. The core message is one of stern-faced seriousness: Bourbon defines a man’s world, and women are welcome only if they play by the men’s rules. It’s enough to make you want to reach for a stiff drink.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.